Ron Moore Tried To Kill Off Will Riker In Season Six!! The Guardian Of Forever Was Originally In ‘Yesterday’s Enterprise'!! (And 100 Other Things Hercules Learned From The Phenomenal New STAR TREK THE NEXT GENERATION Season Three Blu-ray!!!!)

* All four of the writers interviewed were not making their livings as writers when they joined the TNG writing staff.

* Moore got onto the show through via his girlfriend, who engineered for Moore (then working as a messenger) a set tour. Moore handed a spec script to the guy giving the tour. Moore’s script, titled “The Bonding” (the crew looks after a freshly orphaned Enterprise resident) sat in something called a “slush pile” for seven months before newly hired “Simon & Simon” writer Michael Piller read Moore’s script and bought it. It became the fifth episode of the show’s third season.

* It was Moore’s “Bonding” script that inspired incoming showrunner Piller to launch the show’s open submission policy, which did not require aspiring writers to utilize an agent to submit scripts. All writers had to do under the Piller regime was sign a Paramount release form. The show then hired full-time employees whose only job was to read submitted “Star Trek: The Next Generation” specs. Thursday was designated “Hell Day” because every staff writer was required to take an outsider’s pitch that day.

* Braga and Shankar both started at TNG as interns.

* Echevarria’s script “The Offspring” (Data creates his own kid) got him hired as a writer when he was still a struggling playwright.

* Future “Voyager” co-creator Jeri Taylor is referred to as the writers’ den mother, Piller their “somewhat remote father.” (Taylor, a veteran of crime shows like “Quincy,” “Magnum PI” and “Jake And The Fatman,” joined the series at the start of season four, apparently to run the writers’ room after Behr moved on.)

* For all the inflence he would have running "Deep Space Nine," Behr only worked on TNG a little more than half a season.

* The younger writers said they were frustrated with Piller because he wouldn’t let TNG characters argue as much as Spock and McCoy used to.

* Braga didn’t understand why there was a therapist on the ship. “She was impossible to write for,” he laments.

* Shankar didn’t understand why there was alcohol that didn’t get you drunk. And writers joked that if people really had holodecks and replicators they would never leave the house.

* David Goodman, who used to write for “Star Trek: Enterprise,” now writes for “Family Guy.”

* Moore says seasons one and two were “very chaotic internally” among its creators, with a lot of behind-the-scenes politics, fights and rivalries.

* When Piller was hired to run the season-three writers’ room, he announced he wanted to make the show more of a “character show.” Each episode had to focus on a regular character rather than a foreign planet’s culture.

* Moore recalls that Gene Roddenberry hated his pitch for the season-four episode “Family” (Picard, still jittery from his assimilation by The Borg, visits his jealous brother’s French vineyard) – but, immediately following the meeting in Roddenberry’s office, showrunners Piller and Rick Berman ordered Moore to write it anyway.

* A “technobabble generator” created as a joke by a friend of Shankar became a frequently utilized not-joke writers’ room tool.

* Moore says everybody assumed the series finale would be penned by Piller. (“All Good Things,” for those who don’t recall, was penned by Moore and Braga.)

* Moore and Braga lament that “Star Trek: Generations,” which they labored on for a year, didn’t turn out as well as “All Good Things,” which took two weeks to write.

* Piller argued against the other writers who wanted Wesley to stay true to his fellow cadets in the season-five episode “The First Duty.” Piller prevailed and Wesley did end up throwing his friends under the bus to put Starfleet Academy honor first. The episode, relates Shankar, is now used at the U.S. Air Force Academy to teach cadets about the honor code.

* The writers reveal Brent Spiner grew weary of stories involving Data’s cat Spot. As a practical joke, they inserted into one script a scene in which Data invents a collar that translates Spot’s meows into English.

* Storylines developed for a never-shot season eight included a plot about a Picard clone.

* One storyline that was much fought for before Piller shot it down was to kill Will Riker and replace him permanently with his transporter-mishap doppleganger Tom Riker. “It was a chance to reinvent the character,” explains Moore.

* Melinda M. Snodgrass’ “Up The Long Ladder” (Riker and Pulaski are kidnapped by a planet of clones) is Moore’s least-loved. Braga picks the series’ second episode, Katharyn Powers and Michael Baron’s “Code of Honor” (Tasha is abducted by a planet populated by black people). Echevarria brings up Braga’s “Sub Rosa” (Beverly Crusher is romanced by an alien pretending to be the Scottish ghost of her grandmother’s lover).

* Writers would avoid visiting the set because actors “would corner you,” remembers Braga, who came to romance Trek’s most famous Borg, Jeri Ryan.

* Gene Roddenberry’s original rules for the series included “no time travel,” “no dream sequences” and “no mention of the original series.”

* The last time all four writers sat together was to watch J.J. Abrams’ “Star Trek” movie.

* Braga laments that the Earthbound shows he’s worked on subsequently are “kind of boring by comparison.”

* Writer-producer Ira Steven Behr, sporting a blue goatee and a black fingernail, remembers no one was thinking during season three that season three “was when it all got good.”

* Writer-producer Rene Echevarria says a reverence for the 1960s series might have helped hold TNG back in its first two seasons, but Patrick Stewart was a big part of what kept him watching. He says one of the things that motivated him to write spec scripts for the show was his notion that “this could be done better.”

* The writing team of Hans Beimler and Richard Manning, on staff since season one, were bitter by end of season two because “they were real fans,” says Behr.

* Snodgrass believed Rick Berman, showrunner since season one, was “uncomfortable” with humor on the show.

* Berman, a studio exec before he came to produce the show, says he drove the writers “crazy” with his script notes.

* Snodgrass, Beimler and Manning begged Berman and Piller to let them make a sequel to the Kirk-Spock episode “A Piece of the Action” that would have transformed the gangster planet into a planet on which the residents emulated Starfleet officers, some even going to far as to don fake Vulcan ears.

* Moore’s then-girlfriend Becka was able to get him a set tour because she was an assistant to a casting director who had worked on the show. Moore slipped his spec “The Bonding” to series researcher Richard Arnold, who conducted the tour. Arnold liked the script so much that he would periodically move it to the top of the “slush pile” of unsolicited scripts the show was sent.

* The second Moore script bought was “The Defector,” something freelancer Moore outlined on the spot while lunching with the season-three writing staff.

* After Echevarria rewrote his “Offspring” script at Piller’s directive, Piller phoned to say he was “very disappointed” with the rewrite and told Echevarria that others would now rewrite his script. (The others turned out to be Snodgrass and Piller.) Echevarria was crushed and believed he had blown his big break.

* Behr begged Piller not to send a “How To Write For Television 101” memo to the third-season writing staff, which nearly precipitated the resignations of Beimler, Manning and Snodgrass.

* Berman kept a (posthumous?) bust of Gene Roddenberry in his office that he would blindfold so Roddenberry couldn’t see what Berman and his staff were doing to Roddenberry’s universe.

* Snodgrass said it was Roddenberry’s idea that Data should bone a native in “Ensigns of Command.”

* Behr, who came to the show from “Fame,” had never seen an episode of TNG before he joined its staff midway through season three, and was wholly unfamiliar with its characters and what a Jeffries tube was.

* Snodgrass hated the holodeck so much Snodgrass wanted to write an episode in which everyone discovers holodecks cause cancer. Her suggestion did not sit well with Roddenberry, who created the device.

* During Moore’s first week on the TNG staff, Piller assigned Moore to rewrite both the Worf-centric “Sins of the Father” (which actually began as two different scripts by two different writers) and “Yesterday’s Enterprise.”

* The sequel to “Sins of the Father” violated a series edict that prohibited stories from continuing from episode to episode. Which led to a lot more of that sort of thing.

* Moore’s nickname during season three was “Young Peter Guillam,” the character played by “Into Darkness” star Benedict Cumberbatch in “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.”

* “Yesterday’s Enterprise” evolved out of an idea not from the show’s writing staff but from “pre-production associate” Eric Stillwell – an alternate-universe idea that involved revisiting The Guardian of Forever.

* Behr fought to reference Spock in the “Sarek” episode, but (insanely) met stiff opposition from Berman, who insisted the new series must never reference an original series character – despite the fact that Sarek was in the old series and the pilot featured Leonard McCoy!

* Behr had a great episode idea about Picard getting promoted to admiral and Riker given the captaincy of the Enterprise -- and how Picard dealt with the promotions. But Roddenberry insisted Picard’s insecurities regarding his new life were out of character, and the script was scrapped. That concept evolved into the episode in which Picard gets boned on the pleasure planet.

RESISTANCE IS FUTILE: ASSIMILATING STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION PART THREE: THE COLLECTIVE (30:04)

Learn:

* Spiner is not a fan of people calling him “Data” on the street, but he loved when a Parisian on a bicycle called him “Mr. Spiner!” as he rode by in Paris recently.

* Gates McFadden apparently rejoined the show for season three at Stewart’s prompting. She was disappointed, however, that the romantic potential between Beverly and Picard had apparently evaporated while she was gone, and that Beverly now seemed like a different character.

* Wil Wheaton credits new head writer Michael Piller for transforming TNG for the better at the start of season three.

* Michael Dorn’s Klingon teeth apparently made it difficult for him to enunciate certain lines.

* Dorn believes Moore grew a beard because of his work on the series’ Klingon episodes.

* Berman believes Denise Crosby regretted leaving the show and always welcomed the idea of returning.

* Frakes was always annoyed when the writers made Riker turn down offers of commanding his own ship. He (and many fans) felt his willingness to decline a captaincy was out of character.

A TRIBUTE TO MICHAEL PILLER (13:50)

Learn:

* Piller’s creative writing teacher disliked his work and encouraged him not to pursue writing as a career.

* Behr called Piller “the tin woodsman” because he was so stiff and remote.

* If I understand Behr correctly, Piller – at the time distracted with launching “Voyager” – stopped offering “Deep Space Nine” script notes with 3.13, “Life Support,” on which Piller and Behr differed on whether to kill off Kira’s religious-leader boyfriend Vedek Bareil.

* Echevarria says Piller was aware of the old Kirk-Spock series but he wasn’t a fan of it. Piller, says Echevarria, wanted TNG to be driven by characters rather than ideas.

* Piller would create what became known as “Piller filler,” extra scenes created because TNG episodes often fell unexpectedly short of their running times.

GAG REEL (8:37) See Wesley Crusher blow a line and say “fuck.” See a Romulan crushed to death by what looks like a dry cleaner’s garment bag.

* As a kid Moore half-wrote a prequel to “The Conscience of the King” (Moore’s favorite episode) following midshipman James Kirk and Kodos The Executioner.

* Moore worked odd jobs in Los Angeles for three years before his girlfriend Becka helped launch his screenwriting career by getting him on a tour of the TNG sets halfway through season two.

* Melinda Snodgrass and Michael Piller both gave the episode a production polish.

* Removed from this episode was an element that saw the orphan recreating his dead mom on the holodeck. The kid was also more prone to tantrums in Moore’s original script.

* Gene Roddenberry objected to the script, arguing that children of the future would not be traumatized by the death of a parent.

* The Paramount release form developed for Piller’s unprecedented open script-submission policy (inspired by his success with Moore) was two pages long.

* “Literally thousands and thousands” of unsolicited scripts poured into the series’ offices every season. Three full-time readers were employed through the life of the show.

* A model of the Enterprise Moore built as a youth was used as a prop in Kirk’s quarters for the movie “Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.”

* Moore’s fanaticism for the original series was something he was obliged to hide when among staffers who did not share his ardor.

* Ironically given the subject matter of his first script, Moore was not a fan of children living aboard the Enterprise. He also never understood why a psychotherapist was always sitting on the bridge next to the captain. Moore was also no fan of the replicator, which he believed an enemy of drama.

* Denise Okuda says she always wondered what became of Jeremy subsequent to his Klingon bonding with Worf. Moore explains the staff considered bringing Jeremy back, but doing so would conflict with the series’ early edict against multi-episode continuity. Moore now assumes Jeremy is back on earth with new parents and Worf gets a postcard every so often.

* Spock’s father Sarek and The Guardian of Forever were apparently elements in the earliest drafts of this tale.

* An subsequent version, drafted by freelancer Trent Ganino, created no alternative timeline. It focused on the Enterprise-D sending the Enterprise-C back to its own time without letting the C crew know it is doomed. (That draft also apparently featured a long sequence with Data singing and playing pirate with one of the C’s crew on the holodeck.)

* A subsequent outline penned by Ganino and a TNG pre-production associate named Eric Stillwell creates an alternate timeline that restores Tasha Yar to life, but there’s no ruinous war – and only Riker and LaForge (who are on a shuttlecraft away from the rest of the crew) are aware that history has been changed. Also, this draft changes the gender of the C captain and his/her name from Richard Garrett to Rachel Garrett.

* Moore added the costly war the Federation was losing to the Klingon Empire. Then the episode moved to the writers’ room, where it was outlined by Moore and the rest of the series’ regular writing staff.

* Interested in exploring her relationship with Picard, Piller decided it would be Guinan – rather than Riker and LaForge – who would have knowledge of the altered timeline.

* Denise Okuda remembers something about Picard presiding over a marriage between Tasha Yar and Richard Castillo in one draft, though Moore and Behr have no memory of it. The writers do remember that there was a lot more exploration of a Castillo/Yar romance that was cut because the episode was running long.

* Behr recalls the writers only began to get really excited about the episode when the idea was entertained of violently killing off all the main characters.

* Though she is not credited on the episode, Melinda Snodgrass apparently wrote one of the episode’s acts due to time constraints. Moore, still very new to the staff and anxious to prove himself, scripted the teaser and volunteered to script the final act.

* Behr remembers time crunches had at that point in the season sapped staff morale. “A Matter of Perspective” (in which Riker is accused of murdering a scientist) was the episode shot immediately prior to “Yesterday’s Enterprise.” Behr says Ed Zuckerman, the freelancer who wrote “Perspective,” was so miserable rewriting it he literally fell to his knees and begged Behr to fire him.

* Moore says he wished the Enterprise-D was always lit as it was for “Yesterday’s Enterprise.” Moore says it reminds him of how the bridge was lit for the Kirk-Spock “Star Trek” movies.

* Piller and Berman ordered many rewrites of the scene in which Guinan tries to tell Picard there’s something wrong with the timeline.

* Moore was surprised Guinan was allowed to call Tasha’s season-one death “meaningless,” which he took as an attack on the show itself.

* Both Behr and Moore lament they couldn’t at the time expand “Yesterday’s” into a 2-hour episode. One of the things they would have liked to explored is why alternaRiker always seems so angry with alternaPicard. Wesley and Data’s roles in this reality would also have been explored in some detail.

* Troi is not in the episode because it was decided a warship was no place for a therapist -- though Marina Sirtis does not appear in the bookending scenes set in the original timeline either. (Moore suggests, however, that Troi might have been repurposed as the ship’s chief interrogator.)

* Rick Berman, Brannon Braga and Moore all once lamented that they should have saved “Yesterday’s Enterprise” for the plot of the “Generations” movie, with the Kirk-Spock Enterprise swapped for the Garrett-Castillo one.

* At one point Worf was going to appear on the bridge of a Klingon battlecruiser demanding Picard’s surrender, but Berman vetoed the idea. Behr also doesn’t like the idea of a Worf cameo, deeming it too cute for such a dark sequence.

* For some reason Castillo walks around without his Starfleet chest emblem for most of the episode. Also, LaForge is inexplicably wearing his alternate universe uniform (with the black cuffs) in the episode’s final shot.

* It was Crosby who came up with the idea of bringing herself back as Tasha’s half-Romulan daughter Sela, an idea she pitched to Piller, who then pitched it to Moore.

3.15 “Yesterday’s Enterprise” with director David Carson.

Learn:

* “Yesterday’s Enterprise,” was unexpectedly rushed into production ahead of more completely scripted episodes because Whoopi Goldberg suddenly became available to shoot.

* The bridges for the Enterprise-C and alternate Enterprise-D were designed and built in less than eight days.

* Christopher McDonald, cast in a rare non-creep role as the dashing Lt. Richard Castillo, was moonlighting in a stage play the same week he was shooting this episode.

* Carson suggests that all members of Guinan’s race can somehow sense shifts in timelines, something he was able to explore further when Carson directed “Star Trek: Generations” for the big screen.

* The elevator-cage in which Data’s daughter Lal is initially introduced came to envelope Picard during “The Best of Both Worlds.”

* The workshop in which Data builds Lal is a “re-dress” of the Enterprise’s battle bridge.

* A male dancer, Leonard Crowfoot (who also played Trent in the season-one episode “Angel One”), played Lal before Hallie Todd (who had appeared in 115 epiosdes of the Showtime sitcom “Brothers”) took over the role later in the episode.

* Though Rene Echevarria, who wrote the script, was not on staff at the time, he was flown in from New York to “break” the “Offspring” story with TNG’s writing staff. He was subsequently given two weeks to write a new draft utilizing the writing staff’s collaborative outline.

* Echevarria’s original “Offspring” spec script involved the Ferengi planting a virus in the Enterprise’s computer. In that version Data was identified as Lal’s father while the ship’s computer was designated Lal’s mother. Lal ended up sacrificing herself to save her mom.

* Echevarria says he “couldn’t believe” the writers abandoned the computer-virus element of his initial script.

* One reason head writer Michael Piller liked Echevarria’s spec script was it could be shot cheaply without building any new sets.

* Echevarria was working as a lifeguard at YMCA on 13th Street when he got the call from Piller. He says he had to drink a shot of scotch to calm his nerves before he could call Piller back.

* Echevarria had sent two other spec scripts to TNG before “The Offspring.” In the months between the day he mailed in “The Offspring” and the day Piller phoning him, Echevarria gave up on trying to write for TNG. One of those earlier Echevarria specs – about Riker tricking Picard into thinking he was on the real Enterprise when in fact Picard was actually in a holodeck simulation – would later evolve into season six’s “Ship in a Bottle,” the second Moriarty episode.

* Echevarria estimates roughly one out of 10 unsolicited scripts were passed on to the writing staff from the full-time readers.

* Jonathan Frakes made his directorial debut with “Offspring.” Echevarria went on to work with Frakes on “Castle.”

* Echevarria only met Gene Roddenberry once, a chance encounter in the production office hallway.

* The staff, which at the time included future “Battlestar Galactica” mastermind Ronald D. Moore, would often refer to Data as “a toaster.”

* When the ship wasn’t warping, rhinestones embedded in a black drape served as the starscape outside the ship’s windows.

* “Offspring” and “The Inner Light” are the only two episodes that ever made Denise Okuda cry.

* A bird of prey in this episode was repurposed from an ILM model built for the Kirk-Spock Trek movies.

* “Sins of the Father” began life as two scripts: “Our Brother’s Keeper” by Beth Woods and “Brother To Dragons” by Drew Deighan.

* Woods’ script was about an officer exchange program that brought Worf’s brother Kurn aboard the Enterprise as first officer. Deighan’s script was about the Enterprise being called to the Klingon homeworld because Worf’s father had been accused of being a traitor.

* Piller hated the first draft combining the two scripts, written mostly by a freelancer and “Simon & Simon” vet named W. Reed Moran. Two decades on, Moore says he still finds Piller’s critique of that draft chilling.

* Piller, who was not a fan of the original series, asked Moore to prepare a two-page document explaining who the Klingons were. Moore says he got a lot of his ideas about the Klingons from a Star Trek novel titled “The Final Reflection” by John M. Ford and Frank Herbert’s “Dune.” Moore’s memo compares the Klingon homeworld to Sparta and feudal Japan.

* Tony Todd played both Kurn and a grown-up Jake Sisko on “Deep Space Nine.”

* This episode was the first to depict the Klingon homeworld. Its look was influenced by Asian architectures.

* The Klingon homeworld’s Great Hall was much smaller on “Deep Space Nine” than it was on TNG.

* This is the episode that contained the infamous 13 seconds of standard definition footage that graced 2012’s four-episode Blu-ray sampler. The missing film element was since found, and the 13 seconds are presented in glorious HD on this set.

* The homeworld’s green sky is a nod to “Forbidden Planet.”

* A number of Klingon uniforms worn in this episode are 6-year-old hand-me-downs from “The Search For Spock.”

* The Woods and Deighan scripts had different names for the homeworld. One called it “Kling,” the other “Klinga.” This episode, broadcast March 17, 1990, eventually settled on “Qo’noS” (somehow pronounced “Kronos”), which was also what it was called in “The Undiscovered Country,” released Dec. 6, 1991.

We should also point out that the new Blu-ray set also contains ALL the many standard-definition extras that were included in the excellent season-three DVD set, including 2002 interviews with the series’ now-deceased head writer Michael Piller.